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Cooking and heating with solid fuels indoors pollutes the air and increases the risk of illness for early 3 billion people worldwide. This type of indoor air pollution is the leading cause of lung cancer and chronic lung disease among nonsmoking women in the world’s poorest communities. The risk for cardiovascular diseases, digestive and cervical cancers, and low birth weight babies may increase when women breathe this unsafe air every day.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has joined the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (the Alliance), bringing our public health expertise to the effort. CDC has used disease surveillance data to refine stove and fuel design to help develop safe, efficient, and affordable cookstoves. It is hoped that analysis of these data can lead to greater acceptance in the developing world. CDC is also implementing field investigations and supporting program implementation and evaluation to help the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves promote clean and safe cooking. By evaluating this project alongside other public health programs like clean water, immunizations, prenatal services, and HIV prevention, the relative public health benefit of each can be compared in ways that assure public health investments and activities produce a maximum benefit.

Three billion people in low- and middle-income countries use solid fuels like wood, charcoal, animal dung, and crop waste for cooking as well as heating and lighting their homes. : Long term exposure to smoke from these fuels has been shown to cause ...

Over half of the world's population uses biomass fuels; these households cook on open fires indoors, increasing their risk of adverse health effects due to household air pollution (HAP) from biomass combustion. This study evaluated six improved cooks...

Nearly half of the world's population is exposed to household air pollution (HAP) due to long hours spent in close proximity to unvented cooking fires. We aimed to use PM2.5 and CO measurements to characterize exposure to cookstove generated woo...